The fortuneteller pencil-sketches the basic outline of my life on a paper. How can it be so sparse? I surrender my money and my past to this outline and enter its meaningless chatter. However, there are only promised handshakes with strangers. Luckily, I get to cover myself with some of the paper’s blank space, but it is not the right size for me. I still manage to find an empty spot and stay there quietly as long as I want, but then my stomach aches. I have swallowed up all the painful pronunciations. I beat up the wicked paper and seize it by its collar, but the fortuneteller and the money vanish. My tired past sits alone with a blank look on its face. The fortuneteller returns and digs up dirt where my past is sitting, saying there should not be a seat there. My bad fortune now leans away from me—I want to be avenged, but it is a lost cause. The fortuneteller sees me living out my life from where he is sitting, then quietly runs away.
Yi Sang’s “Fortunetelling” describes something similar to Saju divination method (Ba-Zi in Chinese), known in English as “Four Pillars of Destiny.” It is based on East Asian astrology that divines the querent’s destiny from the eight Chinese characters that are assigned to their birth year, month, day, and hour. The fortuneteller writes these characters down on blank paper and interprets them for the querent to understand their past, present, and future.
Nick Ripatrazone discusses new releases from Margaret Atwood, Yi Lei (translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi), Karina Borowicz, Valzhyna Mort, and more. Together in a Sudden Strangeness, edited by Alice Quinn, collects American poets' responses to the pandemic: "It is what all great anthologies must be: comprehensive, contradictory, stirring."
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"I chose to translate this whole book rather than another selected edition because, although composed of individual poems, It Must Be a Misunderstanding is really a deeply affecting book-length work whose force builds as the poems cycle through their sequences. The 'plot' follows a general trajectory—from early to late Alzheimer’s—with non-judgmental affection and compassionate watchfulness."
